Analysing the Suitability of Multiagent Methodologies for e-Health Systems

Online e-health systems are being proposed and developed at an ever increasing rate. However, the progress relies on the interoperability of local healthcare software, and is often hampered by ad hoc methods leading to closed systems with a multitude of protocols, terminologies, and design approaches. Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) seems intuitively a good approach for developing more open systems. While agent-based e-health systems have been developed, the general hypothesis of the suitability of AOSE has not been evaluated. In this paper, we test that hypothesis, including a case study of applying a normative agent methodology to a particular real-world e-health system, and present an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of AOSE for e-health.